Unethical U.S. e-Waste

Even though holiday sales were down at least 2% from 2007, millions of US citizens awoke Christmas morning to new PCs, televisions and mobile phones. Many of those gifts were replacements or upgrades, which prompts the question, What should you do with your old mobile phone and other electronic/ electrical hardware?

If you're like the majority of westerners, you'll simply toss your obsolete tech into the rubbish. After all, that obsolete 15 inch CRT computer monitor doesn't look as though it's packing 3 kilos of lead. Every day Americans throw out more than 350,000 cell phones and 130,000 computers, making e-waste the fastest-growing part of the U.S. rubbish stream. Improperly disposed of, the lead, mercury and other toxic materials inside e-waste can leak from landfills.

If you're part of the 20% trying to do the right thing by recycling your e-waste, there's something else to worry about. Old phones and computers can be dismantled to get at the useful metals inside, but takes time to do. Thus, many electronics recyclers send American e-waste abroad, where it is dismantled and burned with little concern for environmental or human health. And authorities rarely stop the export of potentially hazardous e-waste. The U.S. is the only industrialized country that refused to ratify the 19-year-old Basel Convention, an international treaty designed to regulate the export of hazardous waste to developing nations. In the mean time, the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) oversees the export of only one type of WEEE--cathode-ray tubes in old Televisions and computer monitors--and a report last August by the Government Accountability Office dismissed the EPA's enforcement as "lacking."

The same report included a sting investigation that found that 43 U.S. recycling firms were willing to ship broken monitors with cathode-ray tubes to overseas buyers without getting the required permission from the EPA and the receiving countries. Yet some of these businesses had been highlighting their exemplary/ ethical environmental principles to the public. "At least three of them held Earth Day 2008 electronics-recycling events," the report notes.

Guiyu, China, receives a lot of exported e-waste where peasants heat circuit boards over coal fires to recover lead, while others use acid to burn off bits of gold. According to reports from nearby Shantou University, Guiyu suffers from the highest level of cancer-causing dioxins in the world and shows elevated rates of miscarriages. "There's women sitting by the fireplace burning laptop power supplies, with rivers of ash pouring out of homes," says Jim Puckett, founder of Basel Action Network (BAN), an electronics waste watchdog. "We're dumping our waste on the rest of the world."

Puckett and other environmental campaigners are pushing to get a full ban on e-waste exports. They're hoping that the new Presidential Administration will prove receptive; as a Senator, President-elect Barack Obama co-sponsored a bill that in 2008 became a law barring the export of mercury.

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